Neil Young & Crazy Horse

Friday Nov. 16, MTS Centre. With Los Lobos, Sadies.

4.5 stars

They’re still Crazy Horse after all these years.

Neil Young and his longtime-sometime-bandmates brought that point home — loudly, noisily, aggressively and even semi-literally — to 10,000 adoring (and mostly middle-aged) fans at MTS Centre on Friday night. On the third visit to his former Winnipeg stomping grounds in recent years, 67-year-old singer-guitarist and former Kelvin student Young whipped the old gray mare that is today’s Crazy Horse through a raw, raucous but ultimately reassuring two-hour journey through the past and into the present.

For those keeping score at home, all the key Crazy Horse elements were there, same and sure and solid as ever: You got slow-burning beats and molasses basslines. Monstrous guitar jamathons with blistering, volcanic solos. Transcendent performances and hypnotic arrangements. Young’s creaky old-man wail and poetic lyrics about love and life and death and rock. And of course, all of it was delivered via the raggedly glorious bashing and thrashing of the world’s greatest garage band: guitarist Frank (Poncho) Sampedro, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina, all of whom have played with Young off and on for 44 years and counting. Not that anybody’s really counting. Even more remarkable than their tenure is that fact that in all that time, not one of them has improved a single iota as a musician. Seriously, any 15-year-old kid in the crowd could easily have taken any of their spots onstage. Of course, their amateur-hour musicianship (offset by surprisingly soulful vocals) has long been one of the joys of Crazy Horse. They’re just regular Joes who like to jam with their pal Neil.

Oh yeah, something else you got: The ridiculously large fake road cases, amps and microphone from their 1979 Rust Never Sleeps tour. (Perhaps this trek should have been called Rust Never Sleeps — and Neil Never Throws Anything Away.) Sadly, you didn’t have the Star Wars Jawa roadies from the movie. Instead, the show began with roadies in white lab coats and mad-scientist fright wigs swarming the stage, supervising a crew of orange-vested hardhats as they raised the cases and lowered the giant-ass microphone, all to the strains of The Beatles’ A Day in the Life (not coincidentally, the last song Young played at his 2008 MTS gig). Finally, when all was in place — including a pair of giant video screens flanking the set and a guy seated behind a computer at a desk at stage left for no apparent reason — the musicians sauntered up in time for a taped rendition of O Canada. Well, that’s one way to get the crowd on its feet.

For their part, Young and his bandmates — clad in their usual array of T-shirts, plaid, denim and sweats — hunkered together at centre stage and warmed up with a slow-burning rendition of the relatively little-known Love and Only Love (from, yes, 1990’s Ragged Glory). How slowly did it burn? It lasted 13 minutes. It featured Young loping around the stage, flailing away at his trademark Les Paul. And it ended with the sort of loose, drawn-out bashfest that has long been a Crazy Horse hallmark. As we would all soon learn, there was going to be plenty more where that came from before the night was through. But not before the first bona fide classic of the 13-song set: A superbly dark and majestic reading of 1979’s deadly Powderfinger.

Of course, as anyone who pays Young any attention knows, he is not a man who rests on laurels. As usual, he’s been playing a big chunk of his new album on this tour. So naturally, he wasted no time digging into tracks from the aforementioned Psychedelic Pill, starting with the autobiographic twanger Born in Ontario. That could have been something of a risky move around these parts, but he wisely pre-empted any enmity when he introduced the song by proclaiming that it was “good to be back in Prairie Town.” That also turned out to be almost his entire repertoire of onstage banter for the night. Along with not resting on laurels, Young is also a guy who lets his music do most of the talking.

On that level, he had plenty to say. Up next was a monumental version of Psychedelic Pill’s nostalgic Walk Like a Giant, which began with a jaunty whistle-while-you-work refrain and ended 23 minutes later (seriously) amid an orgy of stomping cacophony, feedback sculpting and ominous rumbling. Young appeared to have some sort of effects pedal that made his guitar sound like an earthquake — and another that made it sound like someone clanging sheet metal with a hammer.

Thankfully, he also had an acoustic guitar. If the first few numbers seemed like a hurricane — and they had — then the next section brought the calm eye of the storm. The haunting junkie lament The Needle and the Damage Done was introduced by the “No rain! No rain!” clips from Woodstock (the Crazy Horse banner behind the stage was also swapped out for a Woodstock logo). It was followed by Psychedelic Pill’s rootsy musical reminiscence Twisted Road. Then came one of the highlights for the fanatics in the crowd: A performance of the unreleased piano ballad Singer Without a Song. Played by Young at an old upright, the ballad was gorgeous and heartfelt; too bad it was unnecessarily personified by a blond actress who strolled around the stage carrying a guitar case. At one point, she actually put the case down near a microphone stand, where I thought she might harmonize. But no, she just walked away again — because she doesn’t have a song, presumably. Or not. Either way, we could have done without that. It wasn’t the only silliness of the night; for Born in Ontario, roadies carted a large, ancient organ onstage — only to cart it away again untouched after the song, which featured a taped organ solo. That Neil; what a cutup.

On the musical side, the downbeat mood continued with Psychedelic Pill’s Ramada Inn, a sombre tale of a drunken rock star and his long-suffering wife. That one stretched out to the 15-minute mark — clearly the breaking point for some. I saw a woman two rows up playing the Word Mole game on her BlackBerry during that endless solo. And I’m pretty sure she wasn’t the only one hoping that Young was going to snap out of his downward spiral at some point.

Luckily for all of us, that point came sooner rather than later. “Here’s one for ya,” he announced enigmatically before kicking into the instantly familiar, crunching chords of Cinammon Girl. The cheer that rose from the crowd seemed to be equal parts ecstasy and sheer relief. Even the woman up ahead put away her BlackBerry (undoubtedly a relief to the guy with her). From then on, it was full speed ahead — or at least as close as Crazy Horse get to speedy — with punchy versions of Ragged Glory’s F*!#in’ Up (another multi-part workout), Buffalo Springfield’s four-on-the-floor Satisfaction knockoff Mr. Soul, and Rust’s indisputable arena-rock anthem Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black). The latter culminated with the audience singing loud enough to be heard over the band’s amps and the PA — which is to say, pretty freaking loud. Somewhere amid all that momentum and mayhem, the band skipped over Cortez the Killer, which they’ve had in the set list for much of the tour. But honestly, nobody seemed to miss it. Besides, another solo-fest probably would have sent many women in the crowd streaming for the exits.

As it was, plenty of folks were already headed that way before the encore, which began with those lab-rat roadies returning and trying to pack up the gear. Naturally, the crowd waved them off so the musicians could return for Tonight’s the Night’s country-rock sendoff Roll Another Number (For the Road), as good a closer as any. Just as this night was as good a Crazy Horse show as any you’re like to see around these parts.

Long may they run. And here’s hoping they run back this way again.

• • •

Early birds were also treated to a couple of strong opening acts on Friday. First up were Toronto twangmeisters The Sadies, whose set of cosmic Nudie-suit alt-country included a special guest: Western-shirted hometown hero Randy Bachman, who joined them for a suitably fuzzy ’60s-style rendition of The Guess Who’s No Time. Rounding out the three-band bill were Los Angeles Chicano rockers Los Lobos, whose energized, electrified set touched on everything from their landmark album Kiko to Will the Wolf Survive? and Don’t Worry Baby — but didn’t include their ubiquitous hit La Bamba, much to the dismay of the endlessly yammering twit behind me. Sorry, pal. Better luck next time.